The present invention relates to digital-audio-signal recording apparatus capable of creating an audio CD.
There are known digital-audio-signal recording apparatus which copy audio data of a CD to a hard disk and then write the thus-copied audio data from the hard disk to a CD-R disk to create a fresh CD containing the audio data. Some of these apparatus are in actual commercial use today as dedicated equipment, and functions similar to those of such apparatus can also be implemented using a combination of a personal computer and software.
However, it has not been easy for ordinary audiophiles to use personal computers for such purposes because the personal computers require troublesome manipulations. The commercial-use dedicated equipment, on the other hand, are relatively easy to manipulate, but could not be properly used as consumer equipment because they undesirably enable digital copying of audio data in a chain-like or concatenated fashion.
In the case where the above-mentioned digital-audio-signal recording apparatus is used as consumer equipment, and when audio data (file or track) copied on a hard disk have been written (i.e., re-copied) to a CDR disk, the apparatus operates to protect the copyright of the audio data by erasing the audio data on the hard disk so as to constitute just a transfer of the audio data, rather than a chain-like re-copy (in this case, second-generation copy) of the audio data. However, because the conventional digital-audio-signal recording apparatus can erase the audio data on the hard disk only after completion of the audio data copying from the hard disk to the CDR disk, there would be encountered a problem that appropriate protection of the copyright is not attained because the same actual data are left in both the CDR disk and the hard disk due to occurrence of an unexpected accident, such as power failure or shutdown, or intentional operation by a human at the instant when the data transfer to the CDR disk is completed.
In order to provide a solution to the problem, there has been proposed a more sophisticated digital-audio-signal recording apparatus, which is equipped with a mechanical lock mechanism to keep preventing the CDR disk from being removed from the disk drive till completion of erasure of the audio data from the hard disk. However, such an extra lock mechanism makes the digital-audio-signal recording apparatus more complicated in structure and more expensive and also readily become a cause of failure.